In the age of the “video-first internet”—as internet commentator Ryan Broderick (2023) aptly phrased it—TikTok has rapidly established itself as a central fixture for debate on the state of the web and society at large. The platform serves as a primary generator of new trends and viral content, and as a locus for political concerns around globalisation, surveillance and privacy. Moves to ban TikTok conquered headlines in the United States through 2023, and in Australia, the app was prohibited on government devices in April. Despite politicians ceasing to use the platform officially, political dialogue and journalistic engagement on TikTok persisted. According to the Digital News Report 2023, the use of TikTok for news continues to rise amongst younger Australians. Despite this, the attention to politics and news on these platforms in academic research is still emerging (e.g. Literati, 2021). Across the political and academic spheres, particular focus has been paid to perceived threats of globalisation and international influence, either on the platform’s Chinese business origins or the rapid importation and adoption of international cultural trends. Left understudied is how the richly qualitative video content of TikTok is forging connections more locally. An interdisciplinary, mixed-methods approach for studying the role of video in political discourse is especially needed in order to grasp the range of uses of the platform and its content affordances, such as voiceovers, music, editing, and filters, as well as infrastructure affordances, such as stitches, topics, and music-as-search—and the work involved in these layers of political engagement (Abidin, 2016).
In this paper, we present an exploration of the dynamics of political discourses on TikTok through the case study of local city council elections, leading into upcoming state elections, for the city council of Brisbane in the state of Queensland, Australia. Regular collections of videos were conducted in the four weeks before and after the city council elections on 13 March 2024, drawn from a growing, snowballed list of key topic search terms originating from local media coverage and previous collections. Video metadata was recorded using the Zeeschuimer tool.
We focus not solely on the strategic communication use of campaigning politicians, but on the discursive dynamics of the broader local community both separate and in response to the communication of candidates. Drawing on research on the social news landscape and the role of ‘newsfluencers’ and community narratives amidst changing audience expectations (Hurcombe, 2022), and clustering of cross-ideological ties in social media news sharing over time (Angus et al, 2023) we contrast the topic-selective engagement across various actors, from mainstream and Page 97 national news outlets, local or alternative media, businesses, organisations, political campaigners and unaffiliated individual users. As such, we focus on how local TikTok users respond to, remix, engage with, and disseminate political communication on TikTok, as well as how they create their own content of a political nature, such as advocating for/against a candidate, an issue, or engaging in commentary on the wider election process.